My taking on a similar stance of those arguing against evolution as the source of human dominance (ie, if you are wrong, therefore I'm right)
Christianity(for arguments sake, I assumed no muslim/other religion in this thread), or the concept of one God, appeared at most a couple thousand years ago. Human domination of the world started long before that. Please explain.
And no, I don't believe consciouness as defined by most in this thread constitude a great advantage in competition. On the other hand, we can never know the success of animals displaying 'consciousness' seeing in recorded history humans have been the detriment for all other advanced forms of life on Earth, we wouldn't know had humans not existed, crows and giant octopuses would've gained a significant advantage in the wild.
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Bill307
Canada9103 Posts
Well, I am now doing an essay on consciousness. Now, this is probably going to come down to semantics and definitions, but this paper I'm reading illustrates that certain mental tasks require consciousness, and therefore I conclude that animals must be conscious. Furthermore, it is clear that consciousness is not the big mystery that HnR)hT seems to make it out to be. It is actually possible to conduct scientific experiments on consciousness.
The definition of consciousness being used here is, basically, the kind of consciousness you have when you use conscious thought. If you guys are using it to mean anything else then I suggest you pick a different, more precise words (e.g. "self-aware") =P.
The paper I am reading at the moment is here:
http://www.uni-ulm.de/~mkiefer/pdf/DehaeneNacchaceConscio.pdf
Beginning at section 3.3 (page 8), it talks about three mental tasks that require consciousness:
1. maintaining information for more than several hundred milliseconds;
2. overriding automatic, unconscious computations; and
3. "intentional behaviour" (I haven't read this part yet so I won't go into detail about it, unless people really want to know).
Firstly, there is a lot of evidence showing that when we are exposed to new information, any information we do not think about consciously is lost at an exponential rate. After a few seconds, we forget anything that wasn't consciously attended to. In short, without consciousness, we would not be able to remember anything that happened more than a few seconds ago.
One particularly interesting example given in the paper is a situation where subjects are shown two objects of the same size, however one of them appears to be smaller due to an optical illusion. The subjects are asked to pick up one of the objects. If they are asked to pick one of the objects up as soon as it is unveiled, they will be able to grasp both objects equally well. However, if they are asked to wait before reaching for the object, then the longer they wait, the less and less accurate their grip becomes when they reach for the apparently-smaller object. Therefore, if they go for the object immediately, they are able to act on accurate information processed unconsciously that is unaffected by the optical illusion. However, if they wait, their movement becomes more and more influenced by their subjective, conscious perception of the illusion, showing that they lose the ability to use the more accurate but unconscious information they had initially. I think that the first example given in the paper makes for a stronger argument, however I personally found this example more interesting.
I believe the same rule must apply to animals as well, since their brains are essentially subsets of our own, and if they had another way of remembering information without consciousness, then we ought to have it too. Since they can clearly remember information beyond a few seconds, they must be conscious.
The second task... well, I think it is best explained by way of example. An experiment was performed where subjects were asked to classify objects as either "green" or "red". Before each object was presented, the subjects were first shown a "prime", a word that they would see and process consciously and/or unconsciously. This "prime" was the word "GREEN" or the word "RED". This situation normally results in the "Stroop effect": when the "prime" matches the actual colour of the object, the subjects respond faster. In particular, when the "prime" is shown in such a way that it is not processed consciously, the Stroop effect is still observed, therefore it is a result of some unconscious computation in the brain: any conscious processing is only supplemental to the unconscious processing. The details of this procedure, "masking" the prime from conscious perception, are explained earlier in the paper. Anyway, an interesting effect happens when the experiment is altered so that 75% of the time, the prime "GREEN" appears before a red object and the prime "RED" appears before a green object. The Stroop effect would cause subjects to respond faster in the 25% of cases where the prime matched the object's colour. If the prime is not consciously perceptible, then this effect is indeed observed. However, when the prime is consciously perceptible, the Stroop effect is inverted: subjects respond faster when the word "RED" comes before a green object and vice-versa.
Therefore, consciousness is necessary to utilize the correlation between "GREEN" and a red object being shown and vice-versa (when the "prime" was only perceived unconsciously, the unconscious mind did not utilize this correlation), and it is also necessary to override the unconscious effect of the "prime" word.
In conclusion, because these abilities require consciousness, and they can be observed in many animals, animals must possess conscious thought as well as humans. Furthermore, I think it is clear how these abilities (especially having a memory longer than 3 seconds) would provide evolutionary advantages.
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EPT
